Photoshop: Creating a character December 8, 2009
Posted by a00764760 in Photoshop: Creating a cartoon-like character from a photo.add a comment
There are many ways to change an image to a cartoon-like look in Photoshop. A technique I found that seems accurate and simple is by using a drawing tablet along with the pen tool. Also, this process might be difficult for the first time but once you get used to it, it’s like drawing with your own hands. This is the end result:
To start, open your image in Photoshop CS4, any image is fine but I recommend an image that is not highly detailed. As an example, I used a woman’s outline for this tutorial; I will not be able to show you the original image because it is lost. But basically, make a new an empty layer – make sure its highlighted and then use the pen tool to follow the outline of the image, it is tedious so just be patient, try to zoom in so that you can see the edges. Once you made a selection, click the pencil tool and change the size to 13, then go back to the pen tool and right-click and choose stroke path, make sure the stimulate pressure checkbox is checked. This will create a simple line drawing here is my example:
Now that we created a basic structure for our image, we can color areas of our image. Same as the line drawing, use the pen tool to select a portion of your image to colour, change the foreground colour to suit your needs, then right-click and choose fill path; this will fill the selected area with the foreground color. To make your image look 3-D you must have 3 colours in total, these are the base, shadows and higlights, you can define the highlight by adjusting the base color so that it is lighter and vice versa with shadows. Then, it is up to you to decide where the shadows and higlights will be. The final product:
